As an update to the post below, I have now simplified this model to include only the following variables: College TD/G, College Share of Receiving Yards, and Weight Adjusted Speed. It should also be noted that draft position is going to have a lot of explanatory power over WR production and I was dumb enough to ignore that in my post below. Enjoy!
Sports Reference and Pro Football Reference are great tools if you’re a stathead and you want to get lost in the numbers. The college football portion of the site now has a searchable play index, so you can do things like query all wide receivers who caught 1000 yards and 10 touchdowns in their senior year.
I did some quick and dirty work on rookie wide receivers this morning in order to compare them to some NFL wide receivers who were immediately productive once they got into the league (I had to paste some of the data into Excel in order to do some simple calculations, so you can’t exactly reproduce what I’ve done just by using the query feature on S-R).
Our comparison set is made up of Hakeem Nicks, Calvin Johnson, and Larry Fitzgerald. Comparing college players is difficult because of the diversity of schemes in the college game and also the wide variation in strength of opponents. So to create a level playing field I’m using a few adjustments. First, I’m calculating receiving yards as a percent of the yards that the team threw for. So Hakeem Nicks’ 1200 yards might not look impressive until we consider that North Carolina only threw for about 2400 yards that year. I’ll do the same thing with touchdowns and then we’ll throw in Sports Reference’s strength of schedule rank for good measure.
First though let’s look at this year’s incoming crop of rookies. Below are the rookie’s stats, along with the percent of team yards and team touchdowns, generally sorted based on the three criteria that we’re looking at. I want to put out this year’s rookies first so that you can see what a broad sampling of wide receivers looks like.
2010 Rookie Wide Receivers – Last Year of College Stats
| Player | Year | School | Rec | Yds | Avg | TD | % of Tm Pass Yds | % of Tm TD | SOS |
| Leonard Hankerson | 2010 | Miami (FL) | 72 | 1156 | 16.10 | 13 | 0.37 | 0.62 | 17 |
| A.J. Green | 2010 | Georgia | 57 | 848 | 14.90 | 9 | 0.39 | 0.47 | 37 |
| Torrey Smith | 2010 | Maryland | 67 | 1055 | 15.70 | 12 | 0.38 | 0.44 | 50 |
| Julio Jones | 2010 | Alabama | 78 | 1133 | 14.50 | 7 | 0.33 | 0.29 | 18 |
| Dane Sanzenbacher | 2010 | Ohio State | 55 | 948 | 17.20 | 11 | 0.32 | 0.37 | 57 |
| Denarius Moore | 2010 | Tennessee | 47 | 981 | 20.90 | 9 | 0.30 | 0.35 | 40 |
| Darvin Adams | 2010 | Auburn | 52 | 963 | 18.50 | 7 | 0.32 | 0.23 | 9 |
| Vincent Brown | 2010 | San Diego State | 69 | 1352 | 19.60 | 10 | 0.35 | 0.36 | 87 |
| Greg Salas | 2010 | Hawaii | 119 | 1889 | 15.90 | 14 | 0.34 | 0.33 | 83 |
| Jonathon Baldwin | 2010 | Pittsburgh | 53 | 822 | 15.50 | 5 | 0.31 | 0.31 | 53 |
| Randall Cobb | 2010 | Kentucky | 84 | 1017 | 12.10 | 7 | 0.29 | 0.27 | 64 |
| Titus Young | 2010 | Boise State | 71 | 1215 | 17.10 | 9 | 0.29 | 0.24 | 70 |
| Austin Pettis | 2010 | Boise State | 71 | 951 | 13.40 | 10 | 0.23 | 0.26 | 70 |
You can see that Leonard Hankerson generally grades out the best of the rookies. He played one of the tougher schedules and caught a disproportionate amount of his team’s yards and touchdowns. In fact, his 62% of his team’s touchdowns is the best by a wide margin. Note that A.J. Green’s percentages only count Georgia games that he played in. If you were to adjust Denarius Moore’s stats to only look at games after Tennessee made a mid-season QB change, he would grade out much better.
So now that we’ve seen what a broad sampling looks like, let’s look at what guys who were almost immediate NFL studs did in their last year in college. Below are the stats for Calvin Johnson, Hakeem Nicks, and Larry Fitzgerald.
Comparison Set – Last Year of College Stats
| Player | Year | School | Rec | Yds | Avg | TD | % of Tm Pass Yds | % of Tm TD | SOS |
| Calvin Johnson | 2006 | Georgia Tech | 76 | 1202 | 15.82 | 15 | 0.51 | 0.60 | 39 |
| Hakeem Nicks | 2008 | North Carolina | 68 | 1222 | 17.97 | 12 | 0.47 | 0.57 | 39 |
| Larry Fitzgerald | 2003 | Pittsburgh | 92 | 1672 | 18.17 | 22 | 0.45 | 0.58 | 55 |
They would all be easily the top receiver in this year’s class by our evaluation criteria. They all caught at least 45% of their team’s yards and also caught at least 55% of their team’s touchdowns. Only Leonard Hankerson is even close to these guys, and he’s not really that close.
Here’s the point. Every year you’ll see fantasy drafters step up and take guys like Julio Jones and A.J. Green for fear that they might miss out on the next Megatron or Hakeem Nicks. But those receivers who make an immediate impact in the NFL are rare, and based on these stats, showed freakish ability while still in college. So if you’re looking at this year’s WR crop, your best value bet is Leonard Hankerson. Maybe Julio Jones and A.J. Green are studs, but their last year in college doesn’t look that much like Nicks, Johnson or Fitzgerald.
